Archive for the ‘Tips & Tricks’ Category

We released a major update to Elcomsoft Wireless Security Auditor, a tool for corporate customers to probe wireless network security. Major addition in this release is the new Wi-Fi sniffer, which now supports the majority of general-use Wi-Fi adapters (as opposed to only allowing the use of a dedicated AirPCap adapter). The built-in Wi-Fi sniffer is a component allowing the tool to automatically intercept wireless traffic, save Wi-Fi handshake packet and perform an accelerated attack on the original WPA/WPA2-PSK password.

The previous article was about the theory. In this part we’ll go directly to practice. If you possess a turned on and locked iOS device and have no means of unlocking it with either Touch ID or passcode, you may still be able to obtain a backup via the process called logical acquisition. While logical acquisition may return somewhat less information compared to the more advanced physical acquisition, it must be noted that physical acquisition may not be available at all on a given device.

Important: Starting with iOS 8, obtaining a backup is only possible if the iOS device was unlocked with a passcode at least once after booting. For this reason, if you find an iPhone that is turned on, albeit locked, do not turn it off. Instead, isolate it from wireless networks by placing it into a Faraday bag, and do not allow it to power off or completely discharge by connecting it to a charger (a portable power pack inside a Faraday bag works great until you transfer the device to a lab). This will give you time to searching user’s computers for a lockdown record.

Bad news: We don’t buy it. Their response seems to address a different issue; worse, some of the reporters just quoted what Apple said without real understanding of the actual issue. So let’s try to follow the story step by step.

Apple has an option to back up phone data to iCloud. Doing that for many years now. On our side, we have a feature to download iCloud backups. The feature has been there for years, too. We are also able to download everything from iCloud Drive (including data belonging to third-party apps, something that is not available by standard means). We can download media files from iCloud Photo Library (and by the way, we discovered that they were not always deleted, see iCloud Photo Library: All Your Photos Are Belong to Us). Then we started to research how iOS devices sync data with iCloud, and discovered that Apple stores more than they officially say. All iOS versions allow users to choose which bits of data are to be synced – such as contacts, notes, calendars and other stuff. Here is a screen shot from iCloud settings captured on iPhone running iOS 10:

We discovered a major security flaw in the iOS 10 backup protection mechanism. This security flaw allowed us developing a new attack that is able to bypass certain security checks when enumerating passwords protecting local (iTunes) backups made by iOS 10 devices.

The impact of this security weakness is severe. An early CPU-only implementation of this attack (available in Elcomsoft Phone Breaker 6.10) gives a 40-times performance boost compared to a fully optimized GPU-assisted attack on iOS 9 backups.

What’s It All About?

When working on an iOS 10 update for Elcomsoft Phone Breaker, we discovered an alternative password verification mechanism added to iOS 10 backups. We looked into it, and found out that the new mechanism skips certain security checks, allowing us to try passwords approximately 2500 times faster compared to the old mechanism used in iOS 9 and older.

This new vector of attack is specific to password-protected local backups produced by iOS 10 devices. The attack itself is only available for iOS 10 backups. Interestingly, the ‘new’ password verification method exists in parallel with the ‘old’ method, which continues to work with the same slow speeds as before.

By exploiting the new password verification mechanism, we were able to support it in our latest update, Elcomsoft Phone Breaker 6.10. Since this is all too new, there is no GPU acceleration support for the new attack. However, even without GPU acceleration the new method works 40 times faster compared to the old method *with* GPU acceleration. (more…)

FileVault 2 is a whole-disk encryption scheme used in Apple’s Mac OS X using secure XTS-AES encryption to protect the startup partition. Brute-forcing your way into a crypto container protected with a 256-bit key is a dead end.

FileVault 2 volumes can be unlocked with a password to any account with “unlock” privileges. We have tools (Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery) that can brute-force user passwords, which can also unlock the encrypted volume. However, this is still not easy enough and not fast enough. The result is not guaranteed either.

For many months, a working jailbreak was not available for current versions of iOS. In the end of July, Pangu released public jailbreak for iOS 9.2-9.3.3. A few days ago, Apple patched the exploit and started seeding iOS 9.3.4. This was the shortest-living jailbreak in history.

With iOS getting more secure with each generation, the chance of successfully jailbreaking a device running a recent version of iOS are becoming slim. While this may not be the end of all for mobile forensic experts, we felt we need to address the issue in our physical acquisition toolkit.

During the last several years, progress on the CPU performance front has seemingly stopped. Granted, last-generation CPUs are cool, silent and power-efficient. Anecdotal evidence: my new laptop (a brand new Macbook) is about as fast as the Dell ultrabook it replaced. The problem? I bought the Dell laptop some five years ago. Granted, the Dell was thicker and noisier. It’s battery never lasted longer than a few hours. But it was about as fast as the new Macbook.

Computer games have evolved a lot during the last years. Demanding faster and faster video cards, today’s games are relatively lax on CPU requirements. Manufacturers followed the trend, continuing the performance race. GPUs have picked up where CPUs have left.

NVIDIA has recently released a reference design for GTX 1080 boards based on the new Pascal architecture. Elcomsoft Distributed Password Recovery 3.20 adds support for the new architecture. What does it mean for us?

We have a bunch of mobile forensic tools. We have tools for extracting data from jailbroken iPhones and tools for decrypting password-protected backups. Tools for downloading data from iCloud and tools for analyzing user data mined by Google. We even have a tool for decrypting backups produced by BlackBerry 10, one of the most secure OS’es on the market.

We also have a tool for viewing all that data. Elcomsoft Phone Viewer was initially released as a tool to complement our range of mobile forensic tools. Initially, the tool’s sole purpose was enabling our users to view information they extracted using other tools from our range via physical, logical or over-the-air acquisition. Viewing all but unencrypted iTunes backups would require you launching Elcomsoft Phone Breaker to remove protection and decrypt information.

This is no longer the case. Starting with this release, you can use Elcomsoft Phone Viewer as a fully featured, stand-alone tool for accessing mobile data. What did we change and who can benefit from the new features? Read along to find out!

Investigators start seeing BitLocker encrypted volumes more and more often, yet computer users themselves may be genuinely unaware of the fact they’ve been encrypting their disk all along. How can you break into BitLocker encryption? Do you have to brute-force the password, or is there a quick hack to exploit?

We did our research, and are ready to share our findings. Due to the sheer amount of information, we had to break this publication into two parts. In today’s Part I, we’ll discuss the possibility of using a backdoor to hack our way into BitLocker. This publication will be followed by Part II, in which we’ll discuss brute-force possibilities if access to encrypted information through the backdoor is not available. (more…)